Charlotte Brontë

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Standard Name: Brontë, Charlotte
Birth Name: Charlotte Brontë
Married Name: Mrs Arthur Bell Nicholls
Pseudonym: Currer Bell
Used Form: Charlotte Bronte
CB 's five novels, with their passionate explorations of the dilemmas facing nineteenth-century middle-class English women, have made her perhaps the most loved, imitated, resisted, and hotly debated novelist of the Victorian period.
Etching of Charlotte Brontë after a portrait by George Richmond, 1850. She is seen from the waist up, seated, with one elbow resting on a table, that hand holding a small book and the other on her lap, holding a handkerchief. She wears a flat ribbon round her neck, and a dark dress, buttoned in front, with lace trim on the sleeves and bodice. Her dark, smooth hair is pulled back and tied with a dark ribbon.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Elizabeth Singer Rowe
In a later generation Anna Letitia Barbauld followed Hertford and Carter in celebrating ESR her in poetry. Such different figures as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Clara Reeve endorsed her. She had a huge following...
Literary responses Elizabeth Rigby
Brontë also indulged in assumptions about gender and class in her reading of the critique. She wrote: I read The Quarterly without a pang, except that I thought there were some sentences disgraceful to the...
Literary responses Hannah Lynch
Blackwood's Magazine introduced the serialization of this book with a half-promise of its being a clef: It is, we believe, the faithful narrative of an actual experience, the work of a powerful writer whose identity...
Literary responses Patricia Beer
Responses to PB 's poetry have varied widely, even among her fellow poets. Jeni Couzyn has charged her with the crime of not rocking the boat, of making herself a favourite . . . for...
Literary responses Zoë Fairbairns
The anonymous Times Literary Supplement piece was mixed. Though it judged this first book predictable, it did insinuate a comparison to Brontë 's Jane Eyre, and commended the appealingly honest and perceptive treatment of...
Literary responses Emily Spender
The Athenæum reviewer, Almaric Rumsey , guessed the novelist's gender from the use of the bigamy motif, which he felt to be obviously derivative from more talented novelists (Wilkie Collins 's recently published The...
Literary responses Elizabeth Robins
The young Virginia Stephen (usually a reviewer hard to please) praised this book warmly: few living novelists are so genuinely gifted as Miss Robins, or can produce work to match hers for strength and sincerity...
Literary responses Anne Marsh
It was presumably the lightning that made Charlotte Brontë fear a charge of plagiarism when she read the tale following the publication of Jane Eyre.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Editor Shelston, Alan, Penguin, 1975.
509
Literary responses Catherine Gore
Charlotte Brontë wrote to CG to voice her admiration: not the echo of another mind—the pale reflection of a reflection—but the result of original observation, and faithful delineation from actual life.
qtd. in
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research, 1992.
129
Edward Copeland finds...
Literary responses Anne Brontë
On 4 July 1846 two anonymous reviews of Poems by Currer , Ellis and Acton Bell appeared, one mildly positive by Sydney Dobell in the Athenæum, and one enthusiastic in the Critic. A...
Literary responses Rebecca Harding Davis
The book was initially well-received. A reviewer for the mostly female-oriented Peterson's Magazine, for instance, declared that [o]n some of the deepest problems that agitate humanity [RHD ] has evidently thought much and...
Literary responses Elizabeth Gaskell
EG called this work simply a little country love story,
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber, 1993.
251
although it climaxes with a fire and a shipwreck. Charlotte Brontë liked it, and Mary Forster recorded her brother Matthew Arnold 's enjoyment of...
Literary responses Fanny Aikin Kortright
This novel was reviewed for the Athenæum by Horace St John , who placed FAKunmistakeably in the school of Currer Bell ,
Athenæum. J. Lection.
1550 (1857): 881
and somewhat heartlessly maintained that the sister heroines, in...
Literary responses Matilda Betham-Edwards
Geraldine Jewsbury , reviewing this book for the Athenæum early the next year, was not exactly encouraging. She guessed the author's gender correctly, and judged the novel a pale imitation of Charlotte Brontë 's Jane...
Literary responses Jessie Fothergill
The Spectator reviewer admitted to surprise at this novel, since whereas The First Violin and Probation were clever and interesting, it found little, if anything, in them to lead us to expect that their author...

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